The "planet killer" hiding behind the sun isn't one specific object but refers to potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) that orbit within Earth's path, obscured by the sun's glare, like 2022 AP7 and recently discovered objects like 2025 SC79, which are large enough (around 1 km or more) to cause global catastrophe if they hit Earth, with scientists constantly searching for these "twilight asteroids".
BREAKING: The mysterious interstellar object known as 3I/ATLAS, currently hidden behind the sun.. will reappear within hours, and what happens next could change everything.
While 2025 SC79 will make no close approaches to Earth for the foreseeable future, finding hidden asteroids is essential for protecting our planet, Sheppard emphasized in the statement.
“We're talking about a planet that doesn't exist anymore. Theia hasn't existed in 4.5billion years. It was completely vaporised essentially and yet with a good amount of precision, we can figure out where it came from," he added.
Astronomers say they have evidence that there may be a hidden planet in our Solar System. Named 'Planet Y', the Earth-sized world is thought to be at the very edge of the Solar System. The research is the latest in a number of suggestions of unidentified planets which lie beyond Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto.
Saturn won't actually lose its rings in 2025, but they will go edge-on, meaning they will be essentially invisible to earthlings, NASA confirmed.
On March 23, 2178, Pluto will complete its first full orbit around the Sun since its discovery. Of the five dwarf planets in the Solar System – including Eris, Ceres, Makemake, and Haumea – Pluto is easily the best-known due to its brief categorization as a regular planet.
We are extremely confident black holes exist due to overwhelming evidence like stars orbiting invisible, super-massive objects (Sagittarius A*), gravitational waves from merging black holes detected by LIGO, and direct imaging of their shadows by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). While "100% sure" is rare in science, the consistency between Einstein's relativity, observed phenomena, and these new direct proofs leaves virtually no doubt within the scientific community.
In our solar system, Mercury and Venus are the only two planets that do not have any moons, primarily because they are so close to the Sun that its intense gravity makes it difficult for any potential moon to maintain a stable orbit. Mercury's small size and proximity, combined with Venus's slow, retrograde rotation, mean neither planet can hold onto natural satellites.
Although early simulations showed that there was a chance Apophis could hit the earth on April 12, 2068, this was later excluded and JPL Horizons calculates that Apophis will be about 1.864 ± 0.0024 AU (278.85 ± 0.36 million km) from Earth, making the asteroid much farther than the Sun.
On April 13, 2029 (which happens to be Friday the 13th), something unsettling will happen. A decent-sized asteroid, the 1,100-foot-wide Apophis, will pass so close to Earth it'll be visible in the sky from certain places. Crucially, the giant rock will not strike our humble planet.
Although it's unlikely, asteroid could hit Earth in 2030
The massive space rock--the first object to score above zero on the Torino hazard scale, which ranks the danger of an extraterrestrial impact--has about 1 chance in 500 of colliding with Earth in 2030, astronomers estimate.
The creation account in Genesis 1-2 is clear that when God created the world, He also created an expanse in the heavens. When we look up at the sky, we will see stars, but we will also see planets. God created everything; The ultimate course was for man to have a habitable environment.
Yes, when you look at the Sun, you see it as it was about 8 minutes ago because light travels at a finite speed, taking roughly 8.3 minutes to cover the distance from the Sun to Earth, acting like a cosmic time machine, showing us the past of all celestial objects. This means if the Sun vanished, we wouldn't know for 8 minutes, and it also applies to everything else in space, with farther objects showing us even older history.
TON 618 is scary due to its incomprehensible size (66 billion solar masses), making it an ultramassive black hole, its immense event horizon that dwarfs the entire Solar System, its extreme brightness as a quasar outshining galaxies, and the profound mystery of how such a massive object formed so early in the universe, challenging known physics. It represents an ultimate cosmic monster that seems to defy the rules of black hole growth, making it a source of awe and existential dread.
The planet that experiences 42 years of darkness (and 42 years of light) at its poles is Uranus, due to its extreme axial tilt of about 98 degrees, making it "roll" on its side as it orbits the Sun. This unique tilt causes each pole to face the Sun continuously for 42 Earth years, followed by 42 years in darkness, while the equator experiences more typical day-night cycles.
These discoveries brought Saturn's total number of confirmed moons up to 145, making it the first planet known to have over 100 moons.
Pluto is no longer considered a major planet because it doesn't meet the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) third rule for a planet: it hasn't "cleared its orbital neighborhood" of other objects, meaning its gravity isn't dominant enough to sweep away asteroids and dwarf planets in its path, like other large planets do. While it orbits the Sun and is round, its location in the crowded Kuiper Belt means it shares its orbit with many other similar bodies, leading to its reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006.
Black Holes. Find out why we can't see them! At the center of most galaxies is one of the strangest and deadliest things in the universe: a black hole.
One minute near a black hole can equal years, decades, or even millennia on Earth due to extreme gravitational time dilation, where time slows drastically as gravity intensifies; the exact duration depends on the black hole's mass and your proximity to its event horizon, with the effect becoming almost infinite at the horizon itself, making an observer seem frozen to someone far away, though time still passes normally for the person falling in.
By analyzing the frequencies of gravitational waves from a merger between two black holes, the team verified Stephen Hawking's 1971 black-hole area theorem, which states the total surface area of black holes cannot decrease.
2-Minute Speech:
We celebrate Earth Day every year on April 22. This reminds us that Earth is our only home. But our actions—pollution, wasting resources, and using plastic—are destroying nature. We can help by turning off lights, using less plastic, planting trees, and spreading awareness.
So how old is it? Well, if we count from the discovery date, it is yet to celebrate its first birthday in 2178, as one Plutonian year takes ~248 Earth years. The actual age should be similar to our own planet's age of ~4.5 billion Earth years, so Pluto should be a little over 18 million Plutonian years old.